Over the October season of horror I was watching lots of classic monsters and murder flicks and my wife and I also binged on old YouTube videos from the various Joe Bob Briggs’ movie series which featured the eponymous Joe Bob presenting films like a 1990s version of classic horror hosts of the 1960s and 1970s. The best thing about Joe Bob’s shows is that his redneck persona was tempered by his Vanderbilt University education and his obviously deep and broad knowledge about cinema history. Briggs’ shows made lots of teenagers into accidental cinephiles, but he wasn’t the only smarty celebrating American trash in the grunge era.

We also stumbled across this chestnut from the same era, Reel Wild Cinema hosted by the great Sandra Bernhard. Bernhard is currently appearing as a Satanic priestess on American Horror Story: Apocalypse, but she’s never been better than she was in her turn as a whacked-out kidnapper in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy.

Here’s a whopping playlist of Bernhard and the weird and wild film series she hosted when Beck was still a loser…

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My last Kubrick post was well-received so I’m going back to Rob Ager to share another one of his videos deconstructing the master. Ager has done lots of analysis of Kubrick’s work, and this take on A Clockwork Orange is good for October because it touches on a contemporary horror…

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I was running errands last week when I popped into a used book store to unload some volumes I no longer had space for. Knowing I’d get a bit of store credit back I ultimately traded my books for a handful of scary movie DVDs to watch during October. One of those movies was the original A Nightmare on Elm Street on Bluray. The 1987 release is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, and I’m late getting around to my traditional October horror cinema post. Take a terrifying trip back to Elm Street with this sweater weather documentary about Freddy Krueger…

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It’s appropriate that during the month of Halloween we’re also remembering the death of Edgar Allan Poe on October 7th in 1849. But, just like one of Poe’s own detective thrillers, fans of the pioneering author are still wondering about Poe’s demise. Exotic theories abound, but my favorite explanation emerged in the 1990s: it illuminated Poe’s last days by explaining that the author had contracted rabies while living homeless on the streets of Baltimore. There are lots of ideas here, but rabies is my fave…

October 7th, marks Poe’s deathday, and in honor of his macabre sensibility, we visit the morbid mystery of how Edgar Allan Poe died…

Most of you have probably heard some version of the story. On October 3, 1849, a compositor for the Baltimore Sun, Joseph Walker, found Poe lying in a gutter. The poet had departed Richmond, VA on September 27, bound for Philadelphia “where he was to edit a volume of poetry for Mrs. St. Leon Loud,” the Poe Museum tells us. Instead, he ended up in Baltimore, “semiconscious and dressed in cheap, ill-fitting clothes so unlike Poe’s usual mode of dress that many believe that Poe’s own clothing had been stolen.” He never became lucid enough to explain where he had been or what happened to him: “The father of the detective story has left us with a real-life mystery which Poe scholars, medical professionals, and others have been trying to solve for over 150 years.”

Check out all of the theories at Open Culture and watch this biography about the writer to get in the mood for the spookiest of seasons…

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Now that October is upon us, my movie cravings have taken a dark turn: it’s all ghosts, gore, demons, detectives, silly spooks and serious scares. If you’re like me, the Halloween season inspires fright film bingeing like no other, and Netflix is a great resource for scary streaming this time of year. In next week’s Contributor, I’ll be publishing a list of my frightening favorites currently streaming on the service. A few weeks ago I highlighted a local screening of another film that’s also currently on Netflix and will get your Halloween horror season off to a great start. Here are a few words on A Girl Walks Home at Night…

In the first scene of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night a young man steals a cat. He wears a white t-shirt and blue jeans. He leans against a wooden post smoking a cigarette. The image evokes both James Dean and Spaghetti Westerns given the Wild-West-style font used in the ongoing title sequence. It’s not until the camera reveals street signs written in Persian and Middle Eastern-style accordions overtake the soundtrack that viewers realize they’re not in Kansas anymore. 

The young man’s name is Arash. He lives in a tiny apartment with his heroin-addicted father, Hossein. Hossein’s drug use and gambling have him in debt to a drug-dealer/pimp named Saeed – played with gold-draped relish by Dominic Rains. All of them live in Bad City – a kind of Bizarro World, Tehran suburb that was shot in a desert town in California with a cast of Iranian ex-pats. A power plant tower on the skyline billows eternally. Oil derricks pump without end. Bad City is full of bad vibes and angular shadows that recall the German Expressionist films influenced by F.W. Murnau whose Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror gave us one of cinema’s first – and most chilling – blood-suckers.

After Saeed takes Arash’s prized Thunderbird as payment for his father’s debts, Arash steals a pair of earrings from the daughter of a rich family he does odd jobs for, planning to trade the jewelry for the car. But when Arash arrives at Saeed’s apartment he finds the dealer dead on the floor, covered in his own blood. Arash takes his car back. He also steals a silver briefcase full of drugs, money and a revolver.

In the montage that follows, Arash takes Saeed’s place as the neighborhood drug-dealer while the film’s stellar soundtrack propels us into Spaghetti Western territory again with soaring trumpets that nod to Ennio Morricone.

After attending a costume party in a Dracula outfit, Arash wanders through Bad City dazed and confused with a head full of Ecstasy. A girl in a chador – a long head-covering that doubles as a cape – rolls by on a skateboard. She stops and offers to take Arash back to her place where he can rest. This was the girl leaving Saeed’s apartment just before Arash discovered the dealer’s body. Arash doesn’t remember her, but we do. Back at the girl’s basement apartment she puts “Death” by White Lies on her turntable and the couple embrace in a scene that’s as intense, cathartic and romantic as any in recent cinema.

A quick glance at the film’s poster will tell you this is a vampire movie. Director Ana Lily Amirpour shoots it in black-and-white. The cinematography and the character-driven story recall Jim Jarmusch’s early films as much as they do his own recent vampire tale, Only Lovers Left Alive: When Arash and his mysterious girlfriend drive down a desolate, desert road in the middle of the night I was reminded of the midnight drives through the abandoned outskirts of Detroit in Jarmusch’s film. A Girl Walks Home’also reminded me of Lili Taylor’s turn as a neck-biting philosophy student in Abel Ferrara’s outstanding black-and-whiter, The Addiction.

Amirpour stages most of her vampire feedings with nearly-no-gore – unlike Ferrara who practically dipped his camera lens into all that shiny black blood. There’s really spooks here, but they’re mostly played for thrills. Amirpour creates loads of atmosphere and mood while infusing this monster flick with feminist themes and a moving examination of lives inspired by dreams but defined by poverty and hardship.

This flick has its scares but it’s also superbly stylized, sexy and smart. And a shot of the mysterious girl skateboarding down an empty street in the middle of the night, her chador flapping behind her like a pair of giant bat wings, crackles with such pure cinematic excitement that the most frightening thing about this film might be its scary-talented director.

Here’s an interview with the director and her star…

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For this spooky October post I found a little gem on YouTube. It claims to be the first ever television interview with Stephen King and since I couldn’t find an earlier one on the site, I’m gonna take their word for it.

The interview takes place one decade into King’s career after he’s written horror classics like Carrie, The Shining and The Stand. It’s filmed nearly ten years after King’s graduation from the University of Maine Orono and is produced by the school’s public access channel.

I’m not a big fan of King’s books, but I’m a big fan of King and his spectral success story and his crazy work ethic. However, the scariest thing here might be the ancient computer he was producing those early bestsellers on…shudder…

(2017 Addition) The original, first Stephen King video, was taken down by YouTube. It’s been replaced here by a King interview on the Charlie Rose show from 19993…

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Casting about for another spooky October post, this one didn’t take long.

The Simpsons annual “Treehouse of Horror” episodes have become an American Halloween television tradition given the show’s ridiculously long run and the intense creativity highlighted in these seasonal creep-fests. Often, the “Treehouse” episodes are among the best of a given season and if you’re wondering why the show is still on the air, a glance at their most recent tribute to Stanley Kubrick proves that the show continues to have relevance — and references — to spare.

Here’s the episode’s big scene courtesy of Vulture— it incorporates nearly the entirety of Kubrick’s weighty oeuvre. How many references can you catch?

I wonder what Rob Ager will have to say about this?

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This scary October post recalls a subject many of you likely find terrifying: the career of Nicolas Cage. Cage has done a lot of cash cow trash since he won the Oscar for Leaving Lost Vegas. That said, he’s also brought the wild edge to films like Bad Lieutenant, reminding me of the strange brilliance that illuminated his earliest roles.

One of my early Cage faves is the fang-toothed film Vampire’s Kiss, which is celebrating a 25th anniversary this year. Here’s an outrageous collection of crazy Cage scenes from the movie…

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Beginning a month of spooky posts, we start off our October offerings with David Cronenberg’s The Brood.

While the Canadian filmmaker had already established his horror cred with films like Rabid, The Brood was the first film to bring mainstream credibility to the the fantasy/horror auteur that would go on to create Scanners and Videodrome. Mixing a family drama with a psychological gore-fest, The Brood defined the personal terror and body horror themes that have marked Cronenberg’s more mature work.

Happy October spookfest viewing. Here is The Brood…

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I’ve been meaning to add more occult/horror-themed posts here — October is upon us and it’s time to acknowledge the darker side of these days. And if not “these days” then at least days gone by when curses and hexes struck fear into the heart, and magic was to be found in every grove, valley and field.

Recently my pal Beth Gilmore posted this article on my Facebook page. It’s from a study conducted a few years back by three scientists from Athens, Greece. The researchers looked to four medieval physicians to see what they had to say about the disease of lycanthropy. Yeah, that’s right — werewolves.

While all three have a unique take, what most interested me was that they all seemed to claim that lycanthropy was a melancholic malady. In other words, werewolves are sad.

Oribasius, a 4th century physician to the Emperor Julian the Apostate, described lycanthropy in Synagogae Medicae:

On Lycanthropy. Persons affected by lycanthropy go out at night time and wander among the tombs. You can recognize them from the following signs: they are pale with dry, dull and hollow eyes, without tears, the tongue extremely dry and without saliva. They are very thirsty and their legs are covered with scars from frequent stumbling. You must know that lycanthropy is a type of melancholy that must be treated by blood-letting until fainting, and offering an appropriate diet and baths with sweet water. Purgation by the hiera of colocynth must be applied twice or three times, and then use the viper theriaca and the other healing methods for melancholy. When the disease is approaching, you must sedate the patient by the use of wet compresses and administration of opium, rubbing the ears and the nostrils, a somniferous method.

Others attribute similar symptoms to this disorder. An important 11th century Byzantine philosopher and historian, Michael Psellus briefly describes the illness in verse in his work “Carmen de Re Medica”:

Lycanthropy is a status of melancholy
Meaning at the same time misanthropy.
You recognize the affected man
Running around the tombs at night time
Pale, dry, sad and careless of his appearance.

In the 14th century, Johannes Actuarius, gives a similar description:

Lycanthropy is a kind of melancholy making the affected persons wander at night-time, visiting the tombs and the deserts like wolves, and come back in the morning as their human figure and stay at home. In any case, they have ulcerated legs and feet because of falls on stones and thorns; they have dry eyes and tongue and feeble vision. Some patients fear death while others desire it. Some patients avoid speaking and remain silent and sad while others try to converse with people.

The article “Lycanthropy in Byzantine times (AD 330–1453)”, by E. POULAKOU-REBELAKOU, C. TSIAMIS, G. PANTELEAKOS1 and D. PLOUMPIDIS, is found in Volume 20, Issue 4 of the journal History of Psychiatry

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